COMPASSION

This month on the blog I am honoring the voice of the feminine – specifically her tone of compassion – a quality and capacity that lives in each of us, men and women, in yoga it is the left side of your body.

I often share with you that our histories don’t need to be anything alike for us to find similarity in our process. This post will reflect this sentiment through and through.

The first 8 years of my life in Iran it was not just the women who were asked to shove down and cover up their voices and bodies. The men also had no control over the shift and were also asked certain things like no short sleeve shirts, or tucking in their shirts.

It was in my 8th year we moved to Denver, Colorado. By the time I was 11 I understood that the majority of our emotions and opinions, here in the Land of The Free, were also shoved down and unaccepted.

In Tehran I wore a chador to cover up. In Denver, people wore smiles to cover up, especially the mother figures that entered my life. I felt even more suffocated.

There was no space to emotionally feel out what I was going through. This is not just my journey. This is the story of our society.

We draw parallel to women, emotions, and weakness.

We, boys and girls, are brought up in houses where little attention is paid to our emotional health. How we sit with, process, and release emotions like sadness, anger, frustration, disgust, and shame, is rarely talked about or demonstrated. We try to protect our kids from our emotions. And, really we do them a disservice, I see this firsthand with the suicide prevention work I do in high schools across the nation. I am going to be talking about this very topic at DU’s Women’s Conference on April 1st, please join me.

We, as men and women, need to honor all of these emotions to live in harmony.

Challenges will arise to poke at deep insecurities and hurts from all the days before today. You have a choice to be compassionate with yourself in that moment. To allow yourself to feel, understand, and release. Sometimes over, and over. With the process comes great release.

Sometimes it is release of a hurt. Sometimes it is release of a habit.

Both keep you stagnant in life. Despite the bank account and family growing, you feel stuck. It’s because inside you are in the same space, how you view yourself, how you make decisions, how you process your emotions.

Here are two ways to build awareness to your voice of compassion:

Have some Tolerance and Leniency with yourself as you observe and reflect how you can offer yourself more compassion. This can be on a day-to-day, or in times of challenge, and major life shifts.

Do not let this warmth and tenderness towards yourself become your excuse to throw yourself a pity party, or to feed bad habits like shopping, over eating, drinking, smoking, and so on.

You owe it to yourself to be honest.

In this truthful space be compassionate.

Don’t be afraid to go back and reflect on your decisions.

Be sympathetic when discovering why you have done things they way you have.

Every day remind yourself to respect the process, and grow curious about your inner voice and the tone you take with yourself.

A copy of Find Your Voice can help you navigate this process, and keep coming back this month to learn how to use your masculine energy (logic and analysis) to feed and grow your feminine capabilities like creativity, intuition, and understanding.